Seyran
Sucu, Pierre Humblet, Philippe Descamps of the Petzl Foundation and
Patrick Lamarque at an event organized at the historical City Hall in
Brussels

The development of a proposed worldwide accidents
database run by the Mountaineering Commission has been given a boost
from the Petzl Foundation’s board of directors who have agreed to
support the project in principal.

The Foundation’s support is
contingent on the ability of the Mountaineering Commission, which has
been working on developing such a database to cooperate with two French
University professors, also supported by the Petzl Foundation, who have
been working on a similar project.

To facilitate collaboration,
commission member Professor Chiaki Aoyama (Japan), who is behind the
UIAA initiative with Mountaineering Commission president Pierre Humblet
(Belgium), met with Professors Bastien Soule and Brice Lefevre at a
commission meeting in Brussels in November. The foundation provided an
interpreter.

Such a global database, if developed, could help insurance companies better understand risk in mountain activities.

Chiaki
said the UIAA which has member associations across the world
representing millions of mountaineers is ideally suited to play a
crucial role in developing a standardized accident reporting scale for
all mountaineering groups.

The project is the brainchild of
Chiaki, who has been working on developing an international accident
reporting structure for four years and Pierre Humblet who is an
insurance specialist lawyer. It arose out of discussions between the
two about the challenges faced by Chiaki during the development of a
national accidents database in Japan when they met at a UIAA General
Assembly in Matsumoto, Japan.

Chiaki’s problem was his inability
to weigh accident characteristic details because of the lack of
comparative databases from other countries. He spent almost 6 months
travelling in Europe and North America to collect accident data, and
although he was able to amass information from about 12 groups, he found
it difficult to compare and relate what he had gathered.

Chiaki
said the difficulty to find comparative data from around the world for
the Japanese database inspired him to design a detailed, comprehensive
and standardized international web-based template for gathering data in
both a written and an icons model.

"If we can achieve the
standardized mountain accident database in the world, we can weigh the
characteristics of mountain accidents in each country,” said Chiaki.
"The results will save mountaineers life. And it will be used as the
credibility of the technique of training standard.”

Among the
issues discussed between the experts at the Brussels meeting was the
length and detail of the questionnaire and the best way to gather
information which could assess the rate of accidents and to identify the
chain of events leading to an accident.

Humblet said
mountaineering isn’t as dangerous a sport as the public imagines it to
be, and that statistics recently gathered was able to demonstrate this
point.

"With effective statistics we could reduce the level of insurance premiums,” said Humblet.

The
French professors already have agreements with a number of associations
in France to gather statistics, but stated that information can be
sparse, incomplete, and inconsistent in detail and often unavailable.

Meanwhile Chiaki has also been working to gather data outside Japan and in touch with groups in Europe and North America.

The
next step would be for Mountaineering Commission to contact two or
three UIAA member federations to test his web-based question forms by
the spring 2014. The Mountaineering Commission’s Legal Expert Working
Group is also in the process of drafting a contract to facilitate such
information gathering. The draft agreement is expected to be finalized
in the next few months.